Modernizing  and securing the transmission, distribution, generation, and communications components of the power grid requires innovative and sophisticated technical solutions.  Protecting such innovation requires a legal team that understands technology and its intersection with the law.  Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox is uniquely positioned to meet the demands of innovators as the power grid evolves to a smart grid.  Our attorneys have advanced technical training in grid-related technologies and real world industry experience, and we understand the business challenges you face. 

Ensuring the Resiliency of the Power Grid

The vulnerabilities of the grid are real.  The long term consequences of a successful cyber attack are wide-ranging and complex.  But the solution is simple:  Innovation.  Innovation and commercialization of technologies to protect and ensure resiliency of the grid must become key components of our national security arsenal.  As industry responds to these challenges, innovators can best protect their investments and facilitate commercialization through quality patent prosecution and enforcement.  The Sterne Kessler team is taking a leadership role in helping innovators bring their technologies to the marketplace through strategic IP protection.

Communications and Networking Enabling the Smart Grid

Communications and networking technologies enable the smart grid.  In particular, microgrids and virtual power plants require sophisticated network and communications technology to support their seamless integration and operation.  Smart metering, including wireless metering, raises another set of unique communications and control issues involving the replacement, retrofitting and integration of hundreds of millions of meters throughout the world.  The Sterne Kessler team has both communications and networking industry experience, including having successfully assisted in securing and monetizing communications and networking patents related to microgrids and wireless metering.

Smart Grid Enabled Appliances and Devices

Appliances, such as heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, and electronics, account for a significant portion of residential electricity consumption in the U.S.  Increasingly innovations are enabling diverse types of appliances to report their own usage and have  electricity usage controlled remotely.  Sterne Kessler attorneys have long represented leading innovators in home automation, electronics and control systems.  This experience is key to navigating the increasingly crowded patent thicket that is developing in this area.
  
Why Sterne Kessler?

• Our firm’s high level of technical and industry experience is consistently recognized as among the best in the field of intellectual property law.  Most Sterne Kessler professionals hold an advanced level technical degree, including over 50 PhDs in science and engineering.  Most have significant industry experience.

• These credentials are especially valuable in emerging industries, such as the smart grid industry, which involve detailed technical analysis of innovations and new products.  This is particularly important for evolving technology involving grid architectures, encryption, communications protocols, networking, data mining and management, and fault resiliency. We come up to speed on the technology at issue very quickly.

• We provide due diligence strategies that include patent forensics analyses in support of companies with active M&A programs targeted toward niche providers of technologies that help protect, detect and respond to threats to the grid.

• Our team has extensive technology transfer and licensing experience, critical in transferring emerging technology from universities and government-sponsored research programs to industry.

• When it comes time to enforce or defend your patents, Sterne Kessler has a litigation team with a track record of success.  We also have one of the best patent reexamination teams in the United States, which has defended many of the most valuable patents.

• Sterne Kessler's Washington, D.C. location, in close proximity to the United States Patent & Trademark Office, makes for greater cost and logistic efficiencies, which are especially critical in moving patent applications through the PTO quickly and cost-effectively. It also puts us “closer to the action,” allowing us to stay current on what’s going on at the PTO and build on our base of knowledge.

• We have an extensive network of associates outside the U.S., with whom we have developed close working relationships.  We employ cost-effective approaches for securing not only U.S., but global patent protection.  Such global protection is critical given the global initiatives to upgrade power grids.